Andrew Montalenti

For years, every backend software engineering team I worked with struggled with one unavoidable bottleneck: turning working local code into live production reality.

Here we are. 2026.

I’ve struggled to publish a 2026 essay that captures my headspace appropriately.

Background: This is a post I put together as part of an annual ritual I started in 2023, documented in 2024, and continued in 2025: the smartphone app audit.

I’m fortunate that I got a high school education in a US public school system built during a period of post-WW2 abundance — when we invested in the future.

In my last post, I discussed how I upgraded to a Lenovo X1 Carbon Gen 11 laptop (rtings.com review) as my primary Linux workstation.

One of my favorite old Linux jokes is, “Linux is free… if your time is worthless.”

In 2017, CrashPlan was one of the most popular full-computer offsite/cloud backup tools for consumers.

I’m glad to say that the last few months have been a return to the world of day-to-day coding and software craftsmanship for me.

I have a long relationship with digital media.

“The unexamined life is not worth living.”

I recently upgraded from a Google Pixel 7 to a Pixel 8 phone.

When I describe my programming background these days, I say that I code “primarily in Python, JavaScript, Clojure, C… and Zig!”

When you type an address into your web browser and are brought to a web server, a lot of decentralized magic happens within the span of a few seconds.

The film The Big Chill came out a bit before I was born, over 40 years ago, in 1983.

Sam Altman once said: “Minimize your own cognitive load from distracting things that don’t really matter.

This section of Brave New World Revisited, a long essay by Aldous Huxley reflecting on his own novel many years after its publication, can be found on Project Gutenberg Canada; if you enjoy it, I recommend you purchase Brave New World & Brave New World Re…

A few years back, I published The Elements of Python Style, a popular Python code style guide.

When I turned 27, I wrote the following in my birthday post: I don’t need stuff.

In 2009, I quit my first programming job after college to work on a startup.

I’m always surprised to learn that a friend who has used Linux for a long time, in both server and desktop contexts, might not have heard of GNU parallel.

Frederick Brooks once wrote: The programmer, like the poet, works only slightly removed from pure thought-stuff.

It’s not a “left” or a “right” thing.

A few years back, I wrote Clojonic: Pythonic Clojure, which compares Clojure to Python, and concluded: My exploration of Clojure so far has made me realize that the languages share surprisingly more in common than I originally thought as an outside observ…

James Bennett, a long-time Python developer, blogger, and contributor to Django, recently wrote a nice post about the “end” of Python 2.x, entitled “Variations on the Death of Python 2.”

If you’re working on a fully distributed team, partially remote team, or even just working from home occasionally, this is a selection of low-cost equipment you can use to get your home office setup to a “professional” level.

Have you been trying to figure out this new world order with regard to work-from-home (WFH), remote work, distributed teams, and the like?

Do you ever get that feeling like no matter how hard you work, you just can’t keep up?

In the last few months, I have learned a lot about modern JavaScript and CSS development with a local toolchain powered by Node 8, Webpack 4, and Babel 7.

Here’s how Parse.ly’s original 2009 logo looked: Parse.ly has some fun startup lore from its early days about how we “acquired” this logo.